The Freedom Of Being
Freedom means just what it says.
No words, no ideas, can bind it or bend it.
I wake this morning, too damned early.
My mind says try and sleep some more.
Then it decides to be quiet to let the presence of freedom rise, fill me, be all of me; for all around the
night is silent, and the silence of this “presence” may join the silence around, to drive the mind outside
and let me join the night once more in the harmony of sleep.
Then the mind asks, “What is this freedom?”
And it replies to itself, “Keep quiet. Look carefully, and listen well.”
For again and again we are told that the silencing of thought is a prerequisite for the consciousness of
our own freedom. But here I am with these thoughts, and yet it seems that freedom has not left me,
despite this mental activity.
So now I am swept with joy as I see through the joke.
For the freedom that is here, now, has no prerequisites, not even silence.
If freedom requires conditions, it cannot be called “freedom”.
For any conditions would make it limited, and the very word “freedom” means the absence of any
limitation.
Here it is again, totally unlimited, now … now … now … here now, at every heartbeat, despite the
thoughts going on around it.
Every guru, every piece of writing, especially every definition, that tells you how it should be, and how
to get closer to it, is a lie, including these words that now I write, because no words can define it and
there is no path.
It is what you already are, and you cannot get any closer!
The very nature of freedom is that it contains everything, including even the bossy people who tell
others how it should be. But it is as much at home in the street, or the pub, as it is in the university or
the temple; or the bed where one mind still fights with itself over what it “ought” to feel or see.
And thus I return to my early morning state. For in it lies a real illustration of how the mind,
conditioned by instructions, attempts to put chains on itself.
Again and again, the information has been fed to those that search for the truth of themselves, in
spiritual freedom, that the noisy mind is the enemy that needs suppression; that the egoistic
identification with the body and the mind is harmful, and only leads to death and the fear of its
coming.
So we are told to escape this condition and use meditations and other practices to see through it and
beyond it. We are told that our true Self is something much more wonderful than the physical and
biological contents of these atoms that we think we occupy. We may be told that all is one, or that we
are merely a stage on an endless journey of lives, so we should not be bothered too much by our
needs of the moment or the apparent state of the World.
And, all these things we are told, are just as much a conditioning of the mind as the ideas and
identification that they condemn. These words of mine you now read may condition you too, whether
you like them or not.
It remains, as it always has been, up to you, to accept or reject such ideas , for truth and falsehood
can only be determined by the individual being who experiences them.
Any attempt to mould one’s own perception to fit the ideas that someone else has given, are a joke.
Our perception has already been moulded enough by its own conditioning, and it will not become unconditioned
by trying to squeeze it into a new strait-jacket, manufactured and distributed by another
conditioned mind, however holy or special it might seem to be.
Only you can experience the reality of your own moment, and the more it is you that sees, with all
your own clarity and beauty, (as well as your conditioning and your failings), the better it is: for it is
the best that you can do.
To buy some guru’s philosophy and try to impose it on your own perception is a voluntary resignation
of freedom: a desire to exchange fresh air for life in a sealed box.
When I lie in my bed and try to hush up a part of myself, to experience something other than life’s gift
of the moment, it is a futile exercise and a joke that denies a freedom that is always there: to simply
be myself, present, as I am, whatever any guru or book might have to say about it.
There cannot be a greater freedom.
Love
Love
is never absent from the air.
I find it there, each time
the me that blocks the view
has wandered off, somewhere;
Like
many tricky friends
I knew in school,
love reaches round my back
and taps me on the shoulder
so I turn and look
away from where she stands.
But I am not so stupid
that I do not know her hands.
And
when she uses them
to hide my eyes
and whispers in my ears,
“guess who?”
my smile grows so wide
that there is only smile
and nothing else, inside.
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